Artist Neïla Czermak Ichti captures the monsters of her generation

The illustrator, painter, and storyteller Neïla Czermak Ichti is a graduate of the Fine Arts School in Marseille, where the Paris-born artist still lives. The characters in her work may well have alien horns or mermaid-like scales, but their family resemblance is striking. The artist’s features are copied from one face to another, while mothers, aunts, and grandmothers are transformed into avatars. Seamlessly and in the most natural way possible, they all fuse into a syncretic style borrowed from manga, anime, and video games.

This fierce and fantastic procession of characters is conjured up by Czermak Ichti with the tip of a biro – her preferred medium – and sometimes enhanced with acrylic paint. In her works, the monstrous becomes something else: a story of transmission and transition, as well as a sign of recognition. The stroke of her pen is as sharp as a Sphinx’s claw, a hybrid being as impossible to categorize as she herself, or the smiling or weeping kaomoji [Japanese emoji], a creature with a defined chest and a mocking sneer on its lips, as in her recent work Chienne de vie (2022).

Czermak Ichti is part of a rising group of young painters whose vocabulary is drawn from the reappropriation of these borderless neo-mythologies that franchises such as Alien, Dragon Ball Z, and Berzerk have brought to a whole generation. After all, Neïla backwards does spell Alien.

Neïla Czermak Ichti is represented by Galerie Anne Barrault (Paris).

Group show
‘Immortelle’
MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier
Until May 7

Group show
‘100% L’EXPO’
La Villette, Paris
Until April 30

Group show
‘to “the fire next time” »
Villa Arson, Nice
Until May 7

Ingrid Luquet-Gad is an art critic and PhD candidate based in Paris. She is the arts editor of Les Inrockuptibles, a contributing editor at Spike art magazine, and a writer for Flash Art.

English translation: Catherine Bennett.

Published on April 19, 2023.

Caption for full-bleed image: Neïla Czermak Ichti, Aziz at the fun fair, angel passing by, 2020. Photograph by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of Galerie Anne Barrault.